‘O Solon, Solon, you Greeks
are always such children; there is no such a thing as an old Greek.’

Egyptian priest, reported in
Plato’s Timaeus (ca. 360 BC)

Back
in July I mentioned an etymological link between bibliomania and
papyrus, and the time has finally come - as we will soon be sounding
biblio-mysteries from ancient Egypt - to fill you in. ‘Papyrus’ is a
word so ancient that scholars are far from agreed about its original
meaning. One oft-cited theory links it to ancient Egypt’s royal
bureaucracy - pa-pyrus meaning ‘that which belongs to the House (pa)’;
plausible, I thought, until Dr Ossama Alsaadawi drew my attention to the
fact that bab, the precious rolls on which ancient Egyptians
wrote these usually religious texts, simply means ‘chapter’ while rs
signifies ‘praises’; putting the two together produces babrs
(i.e. papyrus), ‘a chapter of divine praises’. The reed from which the
scrolls were made grows in only a handful of locations, principally
along the banks of the Nile, making papyrus a key commodity for ancient
Near East merchants. To make the link with ‘bibliomania’ we must sail
north along the Levantine coast to the mighty Phoenician entrepôt of
Gubal, whose principal asset was its proximity to the cedars of Lebanon,
exchanged for papyrus from timberless Egypt. As literacy took off in the
first millennium BC Gubal suddenly found itself at the hub of a booming
paperchase, reflected in the city’s Greek name, Byblos - a Hellenization
of papyrus (or babrs). The information-age equivalent
would be renaming Los Angeles ‘Tinsel Town’ or replacing ‘Santa Clara’
with ‘Silicon’ for the valley outside San Francisco with an exceptional
density of millionaires. So closely did Gubal (or Byblos) become linked
with its chief import that it even gave the Greeks their word for
‘book’, biblâon (plural biblâa), from which we derive
bible and bibliomaniac. Another closely-related Greek word, papuros,
passed down via Rome and the Battle of Hastings to become the English
word for paper. And while we’re on the subject, ‘book’ derives from the
writing-tablets made of beech (bôk in Old Saxon) on which runes
were notched, while ‘library’ comes from the Latin application of ink to
the inner bark or liber. Egyptian paper, Greek bibles, Latin
libraries and Anglo-Saxon books - each bears lively witness to the many
layers in our eclectic tongue.

Plato’s Timaeus (quoted above) has recently been enjoying a fresh
lease of life as the original source for the Atlantis legend. The
Egyptian put-down forms part of a lengthy preamble which leads to a
description of the fabled continent just before it sank beneath the
ocean waves around 10,000 BC. Atlanteans over the past decade have been
joining ranks with a new breed of maverick Egyptologist, the latter
bringing geological and astronomical data to bear in a controversial
redating of ancient Egyptian civilization. One of the trailblazers is
John Anthony West, former Manhattan copywriter turned astrologer, whose
Serpent in the Sky (1979) popularised the ideas of Schwaller de
Lubicz, author of an unorthodox study about the Great Temple of Luxor.
But hang on a minute: where does Ibiza
fit into all this? It just so happens that West’s second book,
Osborne’s Army (1966) was a novel and like Norman Lewis’s Tenth
Year of the Ship (1962, see Weekly Edition 075 Saturday 3rd
August 2002) is set in a thinly-disguised Ibiza.

Our
subject was born into a comfortable New York family in 1932, making him
a fully-signed-up member of the beat generation. After studying
economics at Lehigh University he worked as a copywriter in New York
until 1957 (when his first short story was published), before giving up
the rat race to join countless other New York beats on the road. Quo
vadis? his fellow-admen might have asked. For many it was a toss-up
between Paris and Ibiza and thanks to a private income West could have
taken his pick; but in 1954 Hemingway had won the Nobel Prize and three
of his most successful novels were set in Spain. Even though that
country now lay under the iron grip of its dictator, the Pityusan
archipelago remained, paradoxically, a unique and sun-soaked haven of
freedom and tolerance. For a new generation of writers there was no real
contest: Ibiza, in West’s own words, was ‘a beautiful, completely
unsoiled place, the home of what was a very bohemian colony …’ Over the
following nine years he became a key figure on the local scene, mingling
with Dutch scribblers and working away on satirical short stories about
the American way of life for journals like Atlantic Monthly and
Shock. Ten were brought together for his first book, Call Out
the Malicia (1961) translated into Dutch the same year (Huilen
met de wolven). Throughout the early sixties he typed up his one and
only novel, Osborne’s Army (1966) which enjoyed enough success to
appear three years later in Dutch (Osborne’s rebellen) and in
paperback as part of the Penguin New Writers series. In a biographical
note West declares that it was conceived on a trip to Puerto Rico and
written over six years on Ibiza. The island on which it is set is called
‘Escondite’ (Hideaway), but although West places it in the Caribbean,
there can hardly be any doubt that the original is far closer to Ibiza:

The sierra forming [the
island’s] spine ends in a cape of rock, a jutting tawny wedge three
hundred feet high; stone bastions, cliff-coloured, terrace the top, and
above these bastions, rising from patchwork greenery, stands the
fortress … White, faded pink, faded ochre, mullioned with green, the
town tumbles down the hollow of a hill; its apex, a ruined cathedral:
its base, mansions graced the broad beach …

‘You mean no one knows about
this place?’

Grimes spins the wheel
neatly, corrects, and noses the boat up to a tilting jetty: ‘Sorta looks
that way.’

Osborne’s Army,
pp. 10-11

As
we saw in Lewis’s The Tenth Year of the Ship, the character and
name of Grimes, a well-known local painter, was simply irresistible for
novelists. The gallery of island bohemians - the majority of them
European - clearly points to a Mediterranean backdrop:

Awaiting the mail boat
became ritual on Escondite … everyone gathered at Theodore’s bar long
before the possible hour of arrival and drank away the interim - most of
the natives showed up as well, so newcomers were greeted with a great
deal of noise and waving. Even Marsh dropped work (perhaps this boat
would bring that one right woman who spoke his language, not that it
mattered). Stefan Verduin showed up, with Jan van Gent and Marja. Van
Gent was considered Holland’s finest young poet: anthologies beginning
at 1300 finished at van Gent. He had been writing advertising copy and
television plays.

p. 128

The duo is probably Jan
van Gent and Marja are Hugo Claus and his wife Elly. Other Ibiza legends
either appear under their own names (Grimes and Stephen Seley) or with
appropriate aliases: the primitive painter Charlie Orloff thus becomes
‘Freddy Rosoff’ while Ernesto Ehrenfeld, failed writer and successful
art dealer is transformed into ‘Kurt Krummer’.

Expatriate life on Hideaway features a certain amount of bitchy
infighting, but is relatively idyllic until the beats find themselves
jostling for elbow-room with two new waves of visitors. The first to
come ashore are the hippies -

soiled jeans and filthy
shirts - unbuttoned, but tied pirate-fashion at the east - many were
draped with bead necklaces; all wore sandals or bare feet; their beards
ranged in texture and scope from the lichenous to the dendroid; each had
a rucksack strapped to his back; a copse of guitar stems bristled. The
women were similarly dressed and equipped, and coiffed like octopi …
They didn’t do very much; they just hung around, a scruffy, idle,
self-styled hagiocracy. Sometimes they went swimming, sometimes someone
strummed a guitar; occasionally there was a lethargic verbal exchange in
the cult’s unintelligible Bêche-de-Mer, but mostly they just sat in the
shade, in big disorderly groups, smoking the free marijuana and staring
at their feet, or at nothing at all: occasionally one would stand,
signal his chick, and they would slouch off together … There were
not enough habitable houses remaining to shelter all these newly-arrived
painters and writers; some set up tents on the beach.

p. 188-90

Even
less welcome are the grockles (a dated word meaning
‘holiday-maker’), whose arrival on a massive scale threatens the status
quo in a far more sinister way:

The town was ‘quaint’, the
natives ‘friendly’, the art colony ‘picturesque’, the beach ‘sandy’.
Though he pointed out the impossibility of docking the big cruise ships
and the need for a landing launch … And Simon Sr. chuckled as his son
concluded; ‘So you see, Dad, the place is wide open and waiting; an
absolutely golden opportunity and nobody has any sense there.

p. 206

Nobody has any sense there. The Simon
dynasty would be delighted by developments on the docking front: Ibiza
will soon have a dique large and sophisticated enough to berth the
Starship Enterprise itself. Cruise-ship tourists come in all shapes and
sizes: ‘nouveau-rich garment czars, branch chiefs,henpecked
chiropodists, rasping viragos from fashion magazines, Kodachrome
families and Iowaschoolteachers with peeling arms.’ But this colourful
cross-section of western humanity proves too much for our eponymous
hero, who gathers around him an unlikely task-force of ten likeminded
heroes, bent on expelling the unwanted visitors and turning back the
clock as far as it will go. First taking a party of grockles
hostage, they manage to secure the immediate departure of not only the
entire tourist community, but also shopkeepers, hotel personnel,
parking-lot attendants, travel agents, gigolos and even balloon vendors.
A concession is made for construction workers, now needed to restore the
island to its original virgin state, a rather daunting task: how long,
the author asks rhetorically,

would it be though before
the destruction workers could blow up, tear down, carry away, and
dispose of the hotels and apartment houses; the cabarets, cinemas and
equipment sheds? … Before the latanier palm and ceiba tree again grew on
the site of the Waffle-orama and the U-Needa-Hotdog? Before the
fraternal and benevolent sea silted over with sand the debris-filled
harbor, and coral again grew and fish swam in their rightful dominion?

p. 281-283

The
Pityusan branch of Friends of the Earth might well ask the same
question, substituting fig-grove (figueretes) and underwater
Posidonia meadows for latanier palm and ceiba tree - and Pizza Hut and
Macdonalds for the gastronomic concessions. The following morning a line
of destroyers blockades the bay backed up by troop transports. The
rebellion is soon over, the instigators apprehended, and the free world
breathes an immense sight of relief. The last thirty pages of the book
are given over to screaming headlines in a variety of typefaces and
languages. The final extended piece is heavy with unconscious irony:
Progress can resume its stately march now that the oddball lunatics have
been removed from the picture.

By
the time Osborne’s Army was published West had left Ibiza of his
own free will and was busy mugging up astrology and Egyptology in
London. His new career as guru of alternative prehistory began modestly
with The Case for Astrology (1970), co-written with his Dutch
translator Jan Gerhard Toonder. This was followed by the unexpected
global bestseller Serpent in the Sky: the High Wisdomof
Ancient Egypt (1979) and a companion volume, The Traveller’s
Guide to Ancient Egypt (1985). These would have joined the ranks of
countless other alternative Egyptology books, barely noticed within
dusty academic departments, had West not in 1989 approached a geologist
from Boston University, Professor Robert Schoch, to establish a
scientific base for Schwaller’s observation that the Sphinx had been
eroded by water. As it is, his work has led to something of a
prehistoric tidal wave. Those wishing to know more about this
controversial redating of the Giza complex might like to consult the
author’s webpage at
http://www.jawest.com

The
former advertising copywriter, satirical scribbler and astrologer is not
just a rebel Egyptologist though: he also takes guided tours of
grockles round the monuments of ancient Egypt. It tickles the heart
to know that the author of Osborne’s Army now ministers to the
very package tourists earlier at the receiving end of his biting satire.
A gentler, more peaceful character (rather Hollywood in sola topi) gazes
out from his webpage, one that recently wrote the Foreword to a
children’s book, The Story ofBes (2000) which is all
about the principal deity of Ibiza. Back in a fortnight’s time with more
on that tale - the recovery of a lost papyrus …